Twitter Shines Bright Spotlight on Brands

In a move that will intensify its competition with Facebook and Google+, Twitter has overhauled its site design and is now giving brands the opportunity to customize their pages and create a more engaging experience for their followers.

The new brand pages offer two features that differentiate them from standard user pages. The first is the opportunity for brands to add a page-wide banner underneath the profile information in the header.

“Communicating with users isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you say it," said a company rep in a Dec. 8post on Twitter’s ad blog. "Now, your profile page does more to help you make an impression with a large header image for displaying your logo, tagline and any other visuals.”

Second, brands will be able to spotlight a tweet at the top of their feed. The spotlighted tweet is auto-expanded, meaning any content—such as a video or photo—it links to will be automatically visible. As the rep notes in the blog post, “Your profile page is your own—your colors, your logo and your message.”

The main takeaway from the redesign is that brands have an opportunity to take more control of not only their identity, but also how their messaging is consumed on Twitter. The new spotlighted tweet will facilitate the delivery of important messages to both followers and other interested audiences.

Both features are free. The redesign has rolled out with 21 initial brand partners including Pepsi, JetBlue and Heineken; other brands will receive access in the coming months.

In this 5th volume of PR News’ Book of Employee Communications, our authors cover more than 45 articles on crisis communications, social media policies, human resources collaboration, brand evangelism and more.